Determining accurate patient weight is extremely important to medical staff that need to administer proper medication and dosage amounts to patients being treated. During a medical emergency such as treating a victim at an accident scene and/or rushing a patient to the hospital, emergency medical service (EMS) personal have little time to estimate a patients weight since medical treatment must be quickly done to reduce pain and discomfort to the patient, reduce further body damage and even prevent death.
Under emergency conditions, the EMS personal often have to rely on rough estimates based on guessing the patients body weight that is often inaccurate. Size, gender, age, and clothing on the patient can further distort the EMS personal from determining an accurate weight estimate.
Underdosage and overdosage of medications can and has resulted from such guess work. Therefore, the proper dosage of medication can be necessary between life and death for the patient.
Scales used at hospitals can provide accurate estimates of a patient's weight. However, such scales cannot be used with foldable stretchers that are used by EMS personal. Additionally, EMS vehicles have limited space and are not suitable for housing existing hospital scales.
Attempts have been made over the years to weigh patients but fail to overcome all the problems above. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,093,895 to Niosi describes a “Patient Weighing Apparatus for Emergency Service Vehicles”, title. However, this patent requires the stretcher wheels engage pads mounted to the floor of a EMS vehicle, which means this device would fail if the stretcher does not properly engage these pads. Additionally, this device does not work when patients must be treated on the stretcher before being transported by the vehicle.
U.S. Patent Publication 2002/0005300 to Saleem describes a “Patient Transporting Apparatus”, title that includes “an upper board . . . supported on eight evenly distributed load cell or strain monitoring devices . . . mounted on a lower board 14 . . . ”, page 2, paragraph 35. However, this apparatus requires “liquid”/“fluid” within the “cells”/“devices” where pressure readings are taken through “connecting tube(s)” from each of the “liquid”/“fluid” filled “cells”/“devices”, paragraph 36. In emergency operations, the “liquid”/“fluid” filled containers can become damaged by being punctured and/or effected by hot and cold environmental conditions. Clearly, if one of the “liquid”/“fluid” filled “cells”/“devices” fails, the entire weighing accuracy would be off. Thus, this apparatus would not be practical for at least these reasons for EMS operations.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,898,811 to Zucker et al. describes a “Device for Emergency Transport Of Pediatric Patients’, title. While children are important patients, the Zucker '811 device is admittedly not suitable or practical for adult sized patients. This device also requires the use of various belts and clamps that would further add delay time to installation and use of the device. Such delay would potentially hamper the life saving and injury reducing results that are necessitated by EMS treated patients.
Thus, the need exists for solutions to the above problems with the prior art.